Tribeca, 4/28.

"At least the Tribeca 'Film Festival' is becoming more brazenly honest about what it is and what it is not, first in [S James Snyder's piece in the New York Sun] and now in Gregg Goldstein's Hollywood Reporter interview with Jane Rosenthal," writes David Poland, noting that the real goal here seems to be "not a working film festival at all, but building the public support to help push through the $626 million pier project.... Shame on media that allows this potential cash cow to masquerade as an event intended primarily to benefit the community." What's more: "They do their best to damage other real festivals that have existed for much longer and really have been built on the communities they service. The most significant infliction of damage is to the San Francisco International Film Festival, America's oldest."

"Yes, I'll admit to being both a crank and an elitist snob," offers Filmbrain. "Why, you may ask, shouldn't there be room in a festival for the likes of both Jia Zhangke and (sigh) Adam Carolla.... Still, buried between the Hollywood tripe and yet another Ed Burns film, there are some gems to be found at this year's festival, and I've been lucky enough to catch three of them so far." Go and see.

At the Reeler:

• Vadim Rizov on Shotgun Stories ("a genuinely exciting debut"), Between Heaven and Earth (another "startlingly good out-of-nowhere film"), A Dirty Carnival ("a generic but smoothly assembled entertainment"), Born and Bred (suffers from "heavy-handedness and tonal schizophrenia"), Miss Universe 1929 ("a TV documentary and it shows") and Diego Luna's Chávez: "Vigorous and entertaining if not entirely convincing, the documentary posits Julio Cesar Chávez not just as a great boxer but as a key to understanding Mexico during the 90s."

• Eric Kohn on I Am an American Soldier: One Year in Iraq with the 101st Airborne ("provides far more insight than the majority of recent nonfiction offerings dealing with the current generation of troops"; related: Marc Pitzke talks with director John Laurence for Spiegel Online - in German), RAZZLE DAZZLE The Lost World (Ken Jacobs's "transition into the realm of digital filmmaking is a slightly awkward one"), The Animated World of John Canemaker (featuring Canemaker's "finest shorts"), Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist ("a crash course on the evolution of the seminal comic book auteur"), Two Embraces (a "mediocre Mexican drama") and Tuya's Marriage ("a gorgeously shot narrative about a fierce Mongolian woman forced to divorce her aging husband and find a new suitor").

• Elena Marinaccio takes notes on the Bringing Home The Bacon panel: "Joined by Slate editor and panel moderator Jacob Weisberg, Julie Delpy, Eva Mendes, Julia Stiles, Mary Stuart Masterson and Rosario Dawson described their separate struggles as aspiring women filmmakers, owning much of their inspiration to fated meetings with strangers on the street and being open to all different prospects, in addition to, of course, lots and lots of elbow grease."

• Jennifer Merin talks with Abby Epstein about The Business of Being Born.

• Fred Durst and Jesse Eisenberg talk about The Education of Charlie Banks on Reeler TV.

"Picture Entourage if it was set in New Jersey and revolved around a group of guys who, instead of being hot-shot Hollywood play-makers, were simple blue-collar offspring with drug habits and no career aspirations," suggests Erik Davis at Cinematical. "Gardener of Eden isn't for everyone, but if you're looking for something original - something funny, dark and painful - then this is a film I highly recommend."

For the New York Press, Eric Kohn listens in on The Kid Slays in the Picture, a panel moderated by David D'Arcy and featuring, among others, John Carpenter, who noted that the "torture porn" of films along the lines of Saw and Hostel "doesn't bother him one bit. In those movies, 'you identify with being tortured, not the torturer,' he said. 'That's what the media doesn't understand.'"

Posted by dwhudson at April 28, 2007 2:06 PM